"can we hire C++ programmers off the street who can hit the ground running"
One of my next-door neighbours is a senior programmer in an outsourcing company
(Plovdiv, Bulgaria is the new Kiev, Ukraine) and spends about 8-10 hours a day up to his eyeballs in C++.
He was interested in what I was doing with Primary children last June,
so I told him and he downloaded LiveCode and installed it onto one of his machines.
About a week later he told me that he found it difficult to work with because it involved a whole different
mental paradigm to C++.
So, while LiveCode may have been put together using C++, it very definitely is NOT C++.
And very, very few C++ programmers are going to "hit the ground running"; there will be a few
conceptual hurdles initially.
Over the last 6 years I have also had undergraduate students from the University and High School
children from the Mathematical school who have all been "rolling around" in C++, C# and Visual BASIC
as interns in my Primary classes . . .
. . . The theory behind these interns is that they would assist the children in getting their heads
round certain programming concepts . . .
. . . The practise has been that ALL of these interns have had 2 problems:
1. As they are between 19 and 24 their brains are not as flexible as 9-12 year olds.
2. Their brains have been "poisoned" by the way things are done in C++, C# and VB.
These problems meant that the 9-12 year olds generally managed to complete
"Richmond's predictable Calculator project" well before those interns.
Imagine the situation where, 15 minutes after introducing a 23 year old woman
who is doing a Masters degree in programming and machine automation at the
Technical University as a skilled programmer to a bunch of prepubescent kids who,
at "best", have fooled around with SCRATCH, they see this woman crying because
she cannot
hit the ground crawling with LiveCode.
Later on that woman, who, to give her a truckload of credit, wiped her eyes and
told the children that they should show her what to do (what a belter to the ego),
said that she felt that the LiveCode classes were useful to her insofar as they
pushed her out of her comfort zone.
At the risk of writing a forbidden word, I will point out (just in case someone hasn't got the idea yet)
that HYPERCARD broke a mould, and that new mould is preserved in LiveCode.
I should also point out that in 1993, when I first encountered Hypercard, my mind had been 'poisoned'
by FORTRAN, BASIC and PASCAL to the extent that it took me a while to work out what was going on with HyperCard.
I was lucky, having only a 6 month old baby in a cot next to the computer to witness my tears.
It should be said, said, and reiterated until everyone is blue in the face, that LiveCode is a different
way of doing things to C++ and friends.